Decoupling and decomposition analysis on the CO₂ emissions of tourism industry: A case study of Hainan

¹ School of Geography and environment / (Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research, Ministry of Education), Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330022, China
² Graduate School of Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330022, China

^* Corresponding author: jiaaniu@126.com

Abstract

Currently, little attention was paid to the tourism’s CO₂ emission (CE) at province level. Thus, taking Hainan as a case, we computed this province’s CE, and analyzed the relationship between Hainan’s tourism economy and its CE, and the drivers of the CE. The results showed that Hainan’s tourism CE increased rapidly from 99.88×10⁴ t in 2001 to 475.07×10⁴ t in 2015. Particularly, Tourism transport always accounted for the largest proportion of tourism CE (more than 74%). Moreover, Hainan presented a holistic weak decoupling (0.68) during 2001-2015. But the decoupling rate was only 57.14%. Thus, Hainan still has much potential to improve the energy-use efficiency of tourism industry for accelerating the decoupling process. In addition, the effect of population was the dominant driver to promote Hainan’s tourism CE followed by expenditure size effect with the contribution rates of 132.52% and 11.78%, respectively. Whereas energy intensity effect played the most primary role in inhibiting CE followed by industrial structure effect, and their contribution rates were -38.65% and -5.58%, respectively. Last, based on these results above, some reasonable countermeasures and suggestions are proposed.